Highly Porous Thermoelectric Nanocomposites with Low Thermal Conductivity and High Figure of Merit from Large-Scale Solution-Synthesized Bi2Te2.5Se0.5 Hollow Nanostructures

Biao Xu, Tianli Feng, Matthias T. Agne, Lin Zhou, Xiulin Ruan, G. Jeffery Snyder, Yue Wu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

138 Scopus citations

Abstract

To enhance the performance of thermoelectric materials and enable access to their widespread applications, it is beneficial yet challenging to synthesize hollow nanostructures in large quantities, with high porosity, low thermal conductivity (κ) and excellent figure of merit (z T). Herein we report a scalable (ca. 11.0 g per batch) and low-temperature colloidal processing route for Bi2Te2.5Se0.5 hollow nanostructures. They are sintered into porous, bulk nanocomposites (phi 10 mm×h 10 mm) with low κ (0.48 W m−1 K−1) and the highest z T (1.18) among state-of-the-art Bi2Te3−xSex materilas. Additional benefits of the unprecedented low relative density (68–77 %) are the large demand reduction of raw materials and the improved portability. This method can be adopted to fabricate other porous phase-transition and thermoelectric chalcogenide materials and will pave the way for the implementation of hollow nanostructures in other fields.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3546-3551
Number of pages6
JournalAngewandte Chemie - International Edition
Volume56
Issue number13
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 20 2017

Funding

B.X. and Y.W. gratefully thank for support from the Office of Naval Research, award number N00014-16-1-2066. T.L.F. and X.L.R. acknowledge the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), award number HR0011-15-2-0037. M.T.A. and J.G.S. would like to acknowledge funding from the Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Centre (S3TEC), an Energy Frontier Research Centre funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under award number DE-SC0001299. The TEM work (L.Z.) was performed at the Ames Laboratory under contract number DE-AC02-07CH11358 which is supported by the Materials Sciences Division of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Keywords

  • Kirkendall effect
  • hollow nanostructures
  • porous nanocomposites
  • thermal conductivity
  • thermoelectric materials

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Catalysis
  • General Chemistry

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